All’s well that ends well with reappearance of mysterious vanishing window

As he carried a load of trash from the evening’s festivities to the dumpster, Fr. Daniel Duling, spotted something big and thought, “No way.”

Almost immediately, the pastor at St. Rose of Lima, Mt. Vernon, realized he was about to bring glad tidings back inside to those who were closing out the parish Christmas party. 

“I walked out that back door, and there it was, as if St. Nick had just delivered it,” he said. 

Attendance at that evening’s party had topped 250 at its peak, Fr. Duling estimates, but things had wound down. The dozen or so diehards who had lingered to help clean up were about to get an early Christmas treat.

Fr. Duling went back inside and asked parishioners Jett Alloway & Logan Wewe for a quick hand.  

“I said, ‘Come on, I need your help moving something.’”

They returned a few minutes later from a storage building on parish grounds and Fr. Duling began to spread the word: The beloved rose window that had adorned the front of the old St. Rose Church building for more than a century – the window that had mysteriously vanished about four years ago – was back.

Despite the late hour and December temperatures, the news prompted calls for a trip to the shed. “They wanted to see it,” Fr. Duling said. “They were all excited and started sharing great memories about the window, the old church, and telling stories that went back to the parish’s founding.” 

And though it was too late to convene an official meeting of the planning committee for St. Rose’s forthcoming discipleship center, the parish now had back in its possession a key piece of its heritage that will almost certainly soon decorate that space.

A misunderstanding?

According to Fr. Duling, discussions about the discipleship center revived questions about the window. As construction on the new St. Rose church began nine years ago, the parish had sought to preserve its history by retaining as much of the old church as possible. Although it had stood for more than 100 years, many of the original building’s interior pieces – the altar, statues, stations of the cross, and other ornamentation – were in sufficiently good condition to find their way over to the new structure.

What to do with other pieces, including those exposed to the weather, was less clear. That included a prominent feature of the old church: a combination of stained glass and wood resembling a large flower. 

“For 100 years, parishioners passed under it as they entered the church,” Fr. Duling said. “It was hard to see from the inside unless you were in the choir loft or looking back from the altar, but it was important to people.”

Four years ago, the night before the window was set for removal before the building’s scheduled demolition, Fr. Duling went to bed with the window in place. Early the next morning, he said, the space it occupied was empty. 

“At 6 a.m. the window was gone,” he said.

It seems unlikely that base motives were why, he continues. Sports fans are known to take mementoes of their favorite teams’ demolished arenas – bricks, hardwood planks, even nails – as relics connecting them to what transpired inside. And when their beloved old wooden church was coming down, Fr. Duling recalls, most parishioners wanted their own tangible keepsakes. “People took home pieces of the trim or other pieces of this and that,” he said. “I think whoever took the window assumed we had no use for it.

“They probably had a misconception of what was going to happen to it and were trying to preserve something that they thought would be destroyed,” he continued. “It might have been just a misunderstanding.” 

But the odds of recovering the piece began to wane as the low-intensity search stretched into its fourth year. “I kind of lost hope that we would find it,” Fr. Duling said. “We had always intended to place that window somewhere out of the elements, where it would not deteriorate any further. As we prepare to build our discipleship center – a multipurpose space with classrooms and offices for our parish – people realized the window would be perfect for it, so we started putting out feelers again.”

A hospitable parish

Those feelers included parish announcements, but also reaching out to the Kingman County Sheriff’s Department. KWCH, Wichita’s local CBS affiliate, caught wind of the search and aired a news segment on the matter. 

Then came the night of Dec. 17, when taking out the trash proved a highlight of the parish Christmas party. “I was so relieved to see it was all in one piece with slight damage on it,” Fr. Duling said.

“I saw such excitement and tears of joy that it came back home,” he continued. “That is a testament to what the window means to people. Some of these lifelong members have parents and grandparents who passed under that window on the days of their baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Having that window back has really touched some people.”

And with ground scheduled to break on the discipleship center in mid-February, Fr. Duling said ideas are already percolating for how to showcase the feature that for so long stamped St. Rose’s façade.  

“It may go into an entryway or into the new parish hall,” he said. “We hope to use the window to help depict the parish history, but we didn’t know if we’d ever get it back, so we had not made a lot of specific plans.”

As he reflects on St. Rose of Lima’s culture and character, Fr. Duling notes that the church’s proximity to both Cheney Lake and prime hunting grounds makes it a frequent stop for visitors. “This parish is a very hospitable, loving family,” he said. “Both in the summer and hunting seasons, we welcome in so many guests, not all of them Catholic. I always think of Jesus with open arms.”

Similarly, he reflects, now that the window has been voluntarily returned, there seems to be mostly appreciation for whoever had it during the preceding few years.

“You know, all is forgiven and forgotten,” Fr. Duling said. “We are just glad to have it back.”